Dublin-based Wattics is an award-winning firm that helps companies reduce their energy costs and carbon footprint by turning complex data into actionable insights.
Its tailored software integrates all types of data for automated discovery of energy use abnormalities, with notifications to end users; with measurement and verification of savings achieved, as part of an end-to-end energy management solution with a dashboard, reports and alerts.
Its suite of existing tools streamlines project management for energy professionals worldwide. Wattics has clients across the globe ranging from energy service companies, utilities, retail, commercial and industrial organisations.
“We have two Horizon 2020 projects currently being funded and have been quite successful in securing this funding for our R&D and focus on innovation – we also have two FP7 projects finishing,” says Antony Schoofs, chief technical officer at Wattics
Internet-of-things devices
Wattics’ Horizon 2020 project, entitled Charged, proposes a framework for achieving greater energy efficiency in public buildings through low-cost, internet-of-things devices showing where and when a building’s energy is being used and wasted.
Buildings consume more than 40 per cent of Europe’s energy use and are responsible for 36 per cent of CO2 emissions. Promoting energy conservation in public buildings has been difficult because occupants have no incentive to reduce the bill, and lack expertise to drive changes and savings.
Wattics proposes to target these wastages through a gamified application that feeds personalised, real-time recommendations to the end-user.
Anthony Schoofs, chief technical officer at Wattics, believes this will encourage people to change their energy behaviour by promoting wide use of novel ICT technologies (including smart meters and renewable energy) that simplify and foster energy savings.
“Charged will also exploit the wide use of social networks and subsequent crowdsourcing technologies so users become more educated on energy efficiency and take this understanding beyond the building in which they encountered Charged."
Optimising energy use
Optimising energy use within the building will also render its consumption more predictable and this will be exploited by the Charged gamified application to optimise use of micro-generated energy and participation to grid energy management programs.
The Charged solution will be developed with iterative end users representatives’ engagement during analysis, design and development. Further users, at least 150 real building occupants in three countries (50 in each building-validation country) will be engaged for deployment and validation.
The design of the game will follow a cleanweb approach and implement a novel social innovation process that will help users understand the environmental implications of their actions and adopt a more green, active and responsible behaviour.
The blend of social interaction and competitions with its personalised character are expected to eventually contribute to the user engagement and commitment to generate savings in the long-term.